Porn producers fight to retain customers by producing ever greater quantities of material just like the stuff they’ve sold before. Microsoft struggle to preserve compatibility with 20 year old software and produce bloated, bug-ridden, hard-to-secure software as a result. GM make big, heavy cars for people who erroneously think heavy = safe and that big outside means big inside (ever been in a Hummer?).
Their mistake? Listening to customers. Here are three good reasons not to:
- They’re vocal - That’s distracting. If you listen closely it’s easy to think the 10 people writing email represent more of your customers than they do.
- They’re already your customers - By catering to the needs of people you’ve already served your products become increasingly narrowly aimed at that group, at the expense of people who would buy from you if you did something a little different. (That’s GM’s problem - want a huge fuel guzzling truck with no ride or quality? Come right over! Want an executive saloon as good as anything made in Germany, Japan or Italy… er… Cadillac? Not so much…)
- They can’t ask for what they can’t imagine - It’s almost impossible to praise what you haven’t experienced but easy to knock holes in new ideas. If you ask before you do the negative feedback is always easier to find than the positive meaning feedback on ideas is worth far less than feedback on products. Unfortunately, critics will happily buy revolutionary products from people brave enough to innovate.
Remember, without innovation we’d never have lived to see the Mongolian Clusterfuck.
The lack of innovation comes not from listening too much to customers, but from listening too selectively. Corporations, particularly the big clunky ones (like GM, and sadly, Microsoft now too) are geared to hearing what they want to hear.
Customers complain all the time about the same-old same-old, but corporations are more focused on listening to the customer issues they can address within the context of what they already do/know how to do. Does this approach lead to more profits now and less profits later? Almost certainly it does. And that’s the focus of the big and clunky.
The customer, by defintion, isn’t “wrong.” But the way in which they are “right” is in the totality of the message, and depends upon the corporation hearing the whole message. And corporatoins as a rule don’t handle nuance well.
Oddly, I’ve read this same sentiment several times in the last 2 weeks. All were be Nintendo Exec’s about whats up with the Wii.